


Blood and Thunder

by Consort of the Moribund (Inksinger), Inksinger



Series: Night Will Bring No Dawn [3]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Interspecies Relationship(s), Original Character Introduction, Original Character(s), Original Character-centric, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-02-13 22:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12993570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Consort%20of%20the%20Moribund, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inksinger/pseuds/Inksinger
Summary: There is a rumor woven about them - never spoken, never written, but known and treated as a sacred truth.Everyone suspects. No one says a word. It is fitting, somehow.





	1. Strong One

Lily is a human woman.

A death knight - the first, they say, the first woman to become a death knight. She is a creature of glorious savagery and granite stability, and she is feared by none so much as her brethren in death.

She is said to find her match in Strong One.

***

He is a tauren death knight. Covered in fur as black as night, he is, with a black mane and tail tuft and braids each as thick as a man's arm. He wears many braids - yet still there remains mane enough to cover him like a hooded cloak.

His weapon is a mighty battle hammer, and it is heavier than Lily and nearly as long as she is tall. It burns with runes for shattering, and so it shatters bones and stones and shields and armies - all like glass beneath its might, and it his will and rage made manifest.

He ripples with muscle even at rest. In battle he becomes a landslide clothed in rotting flesh, and the lines of him grow hard and their shadows sharp. He is massive even for a tauren - to stand before him is to stand within the shadow of a mountain, silent and indifferent.

There are few he could not crush with ease.

He has more scars than maps have roads. His hooves are great and black, shoed by cultists so that a hundred saronite spines enhance both his footing and the damage he can deal with but a single kick.

His horns are long and whole and black as night, with holes bored into them so he can string all manner of decoration through them - he favors bits of broken glass, twisted metal, and small humanoid bones.

His eyes are both intact, and burn with a lurid white-blue light.

His skin is whole, at least as far as anyone can tell.

Only Lily has seen under the heavy iron band he commissioned and now wears about his throat - thick it is, heavy enough that Lily finds it a burden to heft when she lifts it away from him, laced with runes for power and iron skin and unbroken sinews.

Only Lily knows why he wears the band.

Only Lily knows what killed him.

***

He does not often speak, though he does not need to. His every glance holds meaning - every motion, every twitch, every tiny shift in expression, all speak more words than he cares to take the time to speak.

The others among the death knights have heard him roar in battle - a long, low, thunderous noise, at once furious and mournful, the baying of hounds interlaced with the blowing of many funeral horns - and some have heard him bellow orders, his words sharp and thrumming like the beating of a war drum.

Few have heard him speak beyond the battlefield, where the war drum becomes a far-off echo of some long forgotten ritual - low and hollow, striking notes so deep the movement of great boulders against each other could not compete for sheer timbre.

Lily has heard him murmur.

And once,

Only once -

Perhaps their first encounter in undeath -

Lily has heard him sing.

He tells her he still sings.

She believes him.

***

He has no name.

He has never needed one - always, even in the youth of his undeath, always he has known when he was the one commanded.

Others give him names, some slurs, some epithets - Thunder, Gorehoof, Longhorn, Greathammer, Earth-Breaker, Who-Shatters-Armies.

He recognizes all, no matter how new - he answers to all, no matter how vulgar.

He remembers his mortal name.

He has promised to take it up again, should Lily succeed in guessing - but Lily understands already why he would have it forgotten, and has long stopped trying to guess at all.

"Strong One," she calls him.

Somehow it is the only one he deems suitable.

The Scourge would never let him keep it if they knew.


	2. Lily Deathbringer

Strong One is a reclusive man, taciturn and deeply introspective. He does not happily tolerate the company of others.

But Lily, with her girlish features and callused hands - Lily, whose lips are red now with blood and beetle powder, whose eyes snap with blue flames, whose hands are never idle even when she is still and silent - is worthy of far more than tolerance.

Strong One pities those who knew her in life, for the burden of knowing what is changed in her must be a heavy one indeed.

Even more, he pities those who slew her. Surely they did not know the tempest they were helping her unleash.

***

Lily was a woman grown at her death, but she stands barely as tall as Strong One's chest, lean and long-limbed. No one mentions that she is as tall as (in fact taller than) Highlord Mograine, who died a pup too young for battle. No one mentions it, but many have noticed, for Lily reports often to the Highlord. The adornments of the Highlord’s helm account for the difference. Barely.

Lily stands tall and proud, but her shoulders sit in the sloping square of one accustomed to hard labor.

Those who slew her know to avoid her, and shy away from speaking of her rebirth, but a few stubborn recruits have managed to dig up the truth from them: Lily died swinging a harvest scythe.

Her skin bears fewer scars than might be expected - pale, glancing little lines skittering about the washed-out peachflesh of her arms and hands, primarily. Knife marks, scythe marks, and one - wide and oblong, nestled atop the rise of her left wrist bone - she claims is from foul-tempered livestock.

Her death wound is a great chop into her side, stitched shut and wrapped in frostweave bandages. She often allows female recruits and cultists to watch when she much change the wrappings - watch, but never assist. The wrappings need only be changed when they become too old and worn to keep the wound chilled and the deathly odor of her innards contained; Lily will not suffer herself to smell of carrion.

Neither will she suffer any man but Strong One to be present when she works. He is careful not to abuse the privilege.

Her straw-colored hair she keeps tied back, for it is brittle and lank; Strong One does not know if it was always wavy, or if so many years of being bound into a skull-close braid have made it so. Touching it offers him no answers.

She prefers the keenness of the blade in battle, and wields not one, but four. Her weapon of choice is a mighty greatsword, long and tapered in a series of curves both elegant and feral in design. It burns a brilliant sapphire blue, emblazoned with runes for bloodletting and terror, and is nearly as long as the span of her arms. She wields it two-handed, and swings it with deceptive ease.

The loss of the mighty weapon - when on occasion it occurs - is no hindrance. At her hip is sheathed a long dagger, similarly etched with runes - these for poisoning, and slowing, and stifling. Strong One has watched her carve paladins to bloody gobbets with that blade alone.

There are two other blades - looted from some battlefield Strong One does not know of, hidden from all but the smith who fashioned greaves to stow them in. Two ordinary steel daggers with stiletto blades and hilts refashioned into ornamental spikes along the outer edges of her greaves.

Lily does not use them often. Strong One suspects they are not meant for mortal foes.

***

There is one scar that only Strong One has seen, and only because she has shown it to him. It is on the inside of her bottom lip, and matches the line of her own teeth.

She showed it to him in secret, after he pulled her away from the human called Bloodbane. She had been younger then, though not so young as Strong One; her fury had been a wretched, wild thing, unfettered and without the cold channeling she has learned in the years since. Bloodbane had not been able to leave under his own power.

Strong One had not had to speak once they were secreted away; Lily had seen the question in his eyes and breathed--

In.

Out.

\--And pulled her lower lip down, answering wordlessly what he had not asked aloud.

She did not explain. She did not need to. And when next the wretched thing called Bloodbane approaches her - when next she falls upon him as rabidly as before - Strong One does not interfere at all.

***

“What did your lifename mean?” Lily asks one night. Her voice was sweet, once. Now it is the baying of a coonhound, high and rich and demanding his attention.

Strong One is silent for a moment, watching the way the light from the nearby brazier plays across her hair. She has let it loose; no one will disturb them here, not for the moment.

“You were not always Deathbringer,” he finally remarks.

She has learned such rigid control that when Lily finches - on the odd occasion that she does - it is in the flicker of her eyelids only, as though they alone are bound still to the remnants of her unbeating heart.

It is unsatisfactory to her.

She does not answer him. She does not need to; she runs her fingers along the lines of his unguarded throat and feels him understand her.

He is the only one who can.


End file.
